Microsoft's Office 365 was hit with a global outage over a DNS issue that stretched for nearly three hours for some. These outage reports are piling up and Microsoft needs to string together a few outage-free months.

Microsoft's cloud services have suffered a major outage, bringing its Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive and other Live cloud-based products intermittently offline over the last few hours.

The tech giant's official Twitter account for its cloud-based office suite product Office 365 first acknowledged the service disruption at 1.43pm (AEST) today, later explaining that the company believed that a DNS issue was causing intermittent connectivity across the globe.

"Continue working on service restoration for #Office365. Seems to be DNS issue. Intermittent connectivity for all regions," Microsoft tweeted.

The outages are believed to be affecting users of Hotmail, MSN.com and all of Microsoft's cloud-based products across the globe, including Australia.

Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows Live, Chris Jones, jumped the gun on the company's blog at 2.45pm (AEST), saying that services had been restored; however, at 4pm, he said that customers were still reporting problems, and that the company had moved to resolve it.

"We're aware of reports, including the comments posted below, that some customers still are seeing issues. We are working on propagating the DNS config changes, and so it will take some time to restore service to everyone. Again, we appreciate your patience."

The Office Twitter account later tweeted that all services have been restored.

In the bigger picture, Microsoft's outages are beginning to pile up. Last month, an outage hit Microsoft CRM Online and Office 365 and customers were getting a subscription break. That outage was attributed to a networking interruption.

Every cloud service stumbles from time to time, but Microsoft needs to string together a few outage free months to establish its uptime chops.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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